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Tag Archives: Shelby Foote

“Live Forever”

26 Wednesday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Literature

≈ Comments Off on “Live Forever”

Tags

Donna Tartt, Fiction, literature, Mississippi, novel, Shelby Foote, The Secret History, Walker Percy, Writing

Donna Tartt

“The weekends at Francis’s house were the happiest times. The trees turned early that fall but the days stayed warm well into October, and in the country we spent most of our time outside…

It was always a tremendous occasion if Julian accepted an invitation to dinner in the country. Francis would order all kinds of food from the grocery store and leaf through cookbooks and worry for days about what to serve, what wine to serve with it, which dishes to use, what to have in the wings as a backup course should the soufflé fall. Tuxedos went to the cleaners; flowers came from the florists; Bunny put away his copy of The Bride of Fu Manchu and started carrying around a volume of Homer instead…

Though, at the time, I found those dinners wearing and troublesome, now I find something very wonderful in my memory of them: that dark cavern of a room, with vaulted ceilings and a fire crackling in the fireplace, our faces luminous somehow, and ghostly pale. The firelight magnified our shadows, glinted off the silver, flickered high upon the walls; its reflection roared orange in the windowpanes as if a city were burning outside. The whoosh of the flames was like a flock of birds, trapped and beating in a whirlwind near the ceiling. And I wouldn’t have been at all surprised if the long mahogany banquet table, draped in linen, laden with china and candles and fruit and flowers, had simply vanished into thin air, like a magic casket in a fairy story.

There is a recurrent scene from those dinners that surfaces again and again, like an obsessive undercurrent in a dream. Julian, at the head of the long table, rises to his feet and lifts his wineglass. ‘Live forever,’ he says.

And the rest of us rise too, and clink our glasses across the table, like an army regiment crossing sabres: Henry and Bunny, Charles and Francis, Camilla and I. ‘Live forever,’ we chorus, throwing our glasses back in unison.

And always, always, that same toast. Live forever.”

__________

A slice of high neo-romantic writing from the close of act one of Donna Tartt’s spellbinding debut novel The Secret History.

Reading Tartt, who was born in Greenwood, Mississippi and whose prose percolates with an impeccably controlled energy, I’m again struck by the talent of writers from that state, which has long had the lowest literacy rate in the country. Especially when read on the heels of Mr. Foote, a Greenville, Mississippi native who grew up next to Walker Percy, her work will make you think there’s gotta be something in the water.

More fiction:

  • Tartt: The intoxicating power of a teacher who believes in you
  • Philip Roth: Getting people wrong is what makes us human
  • Claire Messud’s beautiful, melancholic paragraph about sending a son to college

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America’s Second Original Sin

24 Monday Aug 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview

≈ Comments Off on America’s Second Original Sin

Tags

Abolitionists, Abraham Lincoln, Academy of Achievement, America, American History, Andrew Porter, civil rights, Civil War, Civil War: A Film, Conversations with Shelby Foote, emancipation, George Custer, Ken Burns, Nathan Bedford Forrest, Robert E. Lee, Shelby Foote, slavery, Slaves, The Battle of Little Bighorn, Ulysses S. Grant, William C. Carter, William Seward

Civil War

“This country has two great sins on its very soul. One is slavery, which we’ll never get out of our history and our conscience… the marrow of our bones. The other one is emancipation.

They told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Two-thirds of them couldn’t read or write. Very few of them had any trade except farming, and they went back into a sharecropper system that closely resembled peonage. I’m not saying emancipation is a sin, for God’s sake… but it should have been an emancipation that brought those people into society without all these handicaps on their head. And now, my black friends, they are tremendously protective about slavery. They don’t want to hear the word. The opposite of the Jews, who are very proud of coming out of Egypt. And it was this short-circuiting, this instant emancipation… it had a very bad effect on them.

I don’t know whether it’s a lesson or not, but I think it needs to be looked at as if you were in that time and place. A lot of things change when you move back to being a part of it…

Go back to the time. Muzzle-loading weapons sound awful primitive. They didn’t seem primitive to them. They were a new kind of infantry rifle that was deadly at 200 yards. That was a tremendous step forward. And the tactics were based on the old musket, which was accurate at about 60 feet. They mostly lined up shoulder to shoulder and moved against a position, and got blown down because they were using tactics with these very modern weapons. They were using the old-style tactics with very modern weapons. A few of the men realized that, Bedford Forrest for instance. He would never make a frontal attack on anything with this new weapon in their hands. But too many of them, including Robert E. Lee and Ulysses S. Grant, followed the old tactics against these modern weapons. That’s why the casualties — there were 1,095,000 casualties in the Civil War. If today you had that same ratio, you’d have something like 10 million casualties, to give you some idea of what happened.

It was far worse in the South than it was in the North. One out of four southerners of conscriptable age was a casualty in that war. In the year after the war, the state of Mississippi spent one-fifth of its income on artificial arms and legs for the veterans. Very few people today realize how devastating that war was, especially to the South, but to the North too. A lot of fine men went into graves in that thing. There’s no telling how many Miltons or John Keatses got buried.”

Slaves

__________

From Shelby Foote’s June 1999 interview with the Academy of Achievement. You’ll find similar and extended reflections in his three-part opus The Civil War and in William C. Carter’s catalog of Conversations with Shelby Foote.

Later in their conversation, the historian is asked to entertain the counterfactual and assess whether the Civil War — with its million-plus casualties — can be rightfully called “inevitable.”

Interviewer: Now that we have 130 years of hindsight, did the Civil War have to be fought?

Foote: There’s a lot of argument about that.

The fact that it was fought seems to me to prove it had to be fought, but even at the time, Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State, called it “an irrepressible conflict.” And indeed, the differences were so sharp, especially by the extremists on both sides: the Abolitionists in the North and the Fire-eaters in the South… there was scarcely any way to settle it except fighting. Just as two men can get so angry at each other, the only way to settle a thing is to step out in the alley and have a fistfight. People don’t do that much any more. They’re more apt to take some blind-side swing at somebody instead of a real fight. But I think there probably wasn’t any other way to settle it. Now if we were the superior creatures we claim to be as Americans, we would not have fought that war, but we’re not that superior by a long shot.

These remarks are basically longer forms of a point made several times in Ken Burns’s documentary Civil War: A Film. In it, Foote reiterates the above theme (and can’t help again nodding to his penchant for throwing fists):

Right now I’m thinking a good deal about emancipation. One of our sins was slavery. Another was emancipation. It’s a paradox. In theory, emancipation was one of the glories of our democracy — and it was. But the way it was done led to tragedy. Turning four million people loose with no jobs or trades or learning. And then, in 1877, for a few electoral votes, just abandoning them entirely. A huge amount of pain and trouble resulted. Everybody in America is still paying for it…

People want to know why the South is so interested in the Civil War. I had maybe, it’s a rough guess, about fifty fistfights in my life. Out of those fifty fistfights, the ones that I had the most vivid memory of were the ones I lost. I think that’s one reason why the South remembers the war more than the North does.

The top photograph, taken in 1862, shows the staff of Brigadier General Andrew Porter. Lying next to the dog in the bottom right of the shot is George Custer, who would later on go to fight and die along with his men in the Battle of Little Bighorn in 1876.

Below it: figures whose names and dates are unknown. If you have a clue, send it my way.

Read on:

  • Gore Vidal: I think Lincoln was dead wrong
  • What the Civil War sounded like
  • Lincoln’s second inaugural address

Shelby Foote

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Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

01 Wednesday Apr 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, War

≈ Comments Off on Shelby Foote: Why Some Who Opposed Slavery Fought for the South

Tags

American History, Appomattox, Civil War, Confederacy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, peace, Secession, Shelby Foote, slavery, The North, The South, Union, War

Confederate Soldiers 3

“Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the war, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. ‘I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,’ Foote said.

His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. ‘Just as I would have,’ Foote said. ‘I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between the North and the South in the war is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.’

Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. ‘It’s a bunch of shit really,’ Foote conceded. ‘But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.’ In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. ‘It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of “I won’t give up, I won’t be insulted.”’

It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ ‘abiding love’ for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. ‘It was a big admission, if you think about it,’ Foote said. ‘A Civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.'”

Shelby Foote 2

__________

Excerpted from Tony Horwitz’s chronicle of the south’s Lost Cause nearly a century and a half later Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War.

More warfare:

  • Foote relates what Yankees and Confederates sounded like in battle
  • William Tecumseh Sherman describes war as “glory’s moonshine”
  • The first book in the Western canon tells how the rich used to fight

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What the Civil War Sounded Like

05 Thursday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in History, Interview, War

≈ Comments Off on What the Civil War Sounded Like

Tags

battle, Civil War, Confederacy, Ken Burns, Shelby Foote, The Civil War, Union, War

Civil War Soldiers

“They both had a particular way of yelling. The Northern troops made a sort of hurrah — it was called by one soldier ‘the deep, generous, manly shout of the Northern soldier.’ The Confederates of course had what was called the Rebel Yell.

We don’t really know what that sounded like. One Northerner described it by describing the peculiar corkscrew sensation that goes up your backbone when you hear it. And he said, ‘If you claimed you’ve heard it and weren’t scared, that means you’ve never heard it.’

It was basically, I think, a sort of fox-hunt yip mixed up with a banshee squall, and it was used on the attack. An old Confederate veteran after the war was asked at a UDC meeting somewhere in Tennessee to give the Rebel Yell. The ladies had never heard it. And he said, ‘It can’t be done, except at a run, and I couldn’t do it anyhow with a mouthful of false teeth and a stomach full of food!'”

__________

Shelby Foote riffing in Ken Burns’s seminal documentary The Civil War.

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